The performance might have been plugged as “Only Philosophers in the Building.” This past March, for Kant’s 300th birthday, the North American Kant Society put on a performance of Thomas Bernhard’s 1978 play entitled Immanuel Kant. It was the play’s first North American production. Never heard of this play by a multiple award winning international author about a world-famous philosopher? It was just translated into English in 2023.
Those acquainted with Bernhard’s work might not be eager to attend one of his plays. After all, Bernhard’s own half-brother, who took care of Bernhard in his final days, called Bernhard a “demon.” Who could expect that the man who said that “we are not properly alive, our existence and suppositions are all hypocritical” would write a play that tickled an audience? Yet, according to Drew Lichtenberg, Associate Director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C., who can take credit for the play’s North American premiere, “the overall mood [of the audience] was celebratory and even euphoric.”
Lichtenberg had his work cut out for him. First, his audience for the premier consisted mostly of professional Kant philosophers, what any stand-up comedian would call a tough crowd. Second, Lichtenberg was taking on a play authored by a self-confessed misanthrope, and a play hostile to an American audience. For example, the character in the play called Kant says: “I find everything American abhorrent.”
In the play, Kant is traveling by ship to America to accept an honorary degree from Columbia University. Kant’s senses are failing, and his only trustworthy interlocutor is a parrot. Bernhard’s Anglophone translator of Immanuel Kant, Douglas Robertson, warns us not to label the play “absurdist,” á la Samuel Beckett, but to attend to the play’s power via its repeated recontextualizations of language from the physical sciences into quotidian discourse. For example, the multiple meanings of “eccentricity” come on stage. However, not so much the eccentricity of planetary orbits, as Kant wrote about in one of his books, Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755), but an eccentricity on display in almost everything about Kant’s trip across the Atlantic.
Toward the end of the play Kant offers some advice about this eccentricity: A body can right itself more readily by coming into contact with many oblique surfaces rather than going head-on into an upright object. Possible translation: Human beings will be better off bumping up against many odd, angular beings than by a direct confrontation with one spineful person. Call it a geometry for living. Think of this kind of speech along the lines of the talk among characters in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There. The exchanges in Being There are frequently allegorized by hearers. Gardening talk is heard by some characters as business talk, so that when someone says, “There will be growth in the spring,” another character takes that to mean the stock market will be higher in a few months. You’ll recall that the Marx Brothers made a living from this sort of opening up the range of language’s references, such as in this bit from Monkey Business:
Woman: You can’t stay in that closet.
Groucho: Oh, I can’t, can I? That’s what they said to Thomas Edison, mighty inventor, Charles Lindbergh, mighty flyer, and Thomas Shefsky, mighty like a rose. Just remember, my little cabbage, that if there weren’t any closets, there wouldn’t be any hooks, and if there weren’t any hooks, there wouldn’t be any fish, and that would suit me fine.
Parting ways with Robertson’s interpretation of the play, Lichtenberg encourages an understanding of the play that latches on to an absurdist vein in the theater that ties Bernhard’s play to Beckett, Ionesco, and even Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films. If Lichtenberg had named Bernhard’s play, he might have called it Parrot Business. In Bernhard’s case, Lichtenberg tells us, Bernhard was specifically obsessed with using the stage to confront Austrians with the crimes and complicity of their Nazi-era past. It’s not plain how one would measure the success of that goal. “This is the context for understanding [the play]. He’s taking the greatest of German philosophers, and the greatest of Enlightenment philosophers, to piss and shit all over the world of 1977 and 1978 in a jubilant manner. If you’re steeped in Kant and philosophy and German history, the punk outrageousness of the writing and the sense of fun comes through in flying colors.”
Lichtenberg is well aware that “the world of 1977 and 1978” included disco, a fun movement not usually associated with complicity in fascism. Lichtenberg stresses the unexpected reception Bernhard’s play received, given the baggage associated with the name attached to the play’s title. Lichtenberg: “The play is a marvelous expression of joie de vivre, another seeming paradox.”
In fact, Lichtenberg feels it important to appreciate the European interpretations of the play that have relied on the absurdist strain in twentieth-century theater and film. Some excerpts of European interpretations of Bernhard’s Kant drama are available on YouTube.
What Lichtenberg and I did not discuss is the limitations of satire, its intolerance to history. The literary critic Gerald Bruns points out in his book Inventions that satire is a kind of “terrorism.” As Bruns has it, “Satire seems at times more quick to punish than to teach, more earnest to destroy than to correct.” Imagine if your own life were to be subjected daily to the authors of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Does anyone welcome a scourge? Comic “roasts” might be thought of as distant cousins to the public entertainment of burning heretics at the stake.
The “demon” Bernhard wrote a play about the person who Stanley Cavell says “is taken by many philosophers to have achieved the most significant and influential recasting of the entire field of philosophy since the classical achievements of Plato and Aristotle.” That assessment alone, regardless of the play’s satirical streak, ought to make Bernhard’s play a significant cultural artifact. Kant has also received a cultural boost recently, thanks to the success of William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels.
However, none of that changes the fact that many more people know about Taylor Swift than they do about Noumena, the Finnish death metal band named after one of Kant’s philosophical terms—if we use that as a way to measure potential interest in the topic of Bernhard’s play. Those who do encounter Kant’s writings, on their own, or through a class, sometimes feel as if they have entered a thick fog of abstractions and logical mazes. In general, Kant’s works have not been a magnet for the Anglophone public. His reputation for difficulty means some have deliberately avoided Kant. Thus, the question arises: What does it mean to put on a play about a philosopher most people avoid, a play authored by a self-confessed misanthrope, and a play that could be read as hostile to an American audience?
For Katharina Kraus, the Kant philosopher who worked with Lichtenberg to stage readings of Immanuel Kant at Johns Hopkins University and the D.C. Goethe-Institut, Bernhard is, in part, poking fun at Kant. Lichtenberg said Kraus helped him to see that “the play’s language is structured to both emulate and parody Kantian syllogisms, these Latinate or mathematical sentence constructions in which Kant liked to express himself.” The result? Lichtenberg says, “It played like a raucous, provocative comedy, with Bernhard’s mixture of non sequiturs and melancholy stream-of-consciousness monologues building to a peak of hilarity.” The Marx Brothers may have more in common with Kant than we, at first, might imagine.
Bruce J. Krajewski
Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender'sKant for Children(forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).
